I'd like to play the Bomberman games for the Arcade cabinets so I can record some footage and take snapshots. I'm having trouble getting things going. Can anyone help me out?

What are you in need of, a screen recording program or an emulator and games? The only Bomberman games that I know of for arcade is Bomberman World which you'll need Mame for, and Neo Bomberman which you can use other emulators like WinKawaks.

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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts."

Remember that you need not only the game roms, but also the system roms, that's something common to miss.

As for recording software, camstudio is your best free bet,
http://camstudio.org/
and I suggest recording it in this codec.
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

camstudio takes a bit of toying in settings to get things recording perfectly though...

Thanks for the camstudio links. What are the system roms? I've used emulators before but I've never heard anything like this. I'm slowly realizing that Arcade emulation is different from other emulation.

system roms I believe are the emulated arcade Bios. Without the Bios, an arcade cabnet can not run the game, just like how a computer can not run without its bios, so Mame requires the bios for each particular cabnet, there are mame downloads out there on bittorrent that has the roms completely set up and ready to run, so your best bet is to actually get the games you are looking for through that method.

What Fireball was referring to as system roms is the System BIOS for an arcade machine, emulators for certain game consoles also need a System BIOS to run so it's not that much different than other emulation.

For a Mame emulator there's MameUIFX32, http://mame32fx.altervista.org/download.htm.

For CPS1, CPS2 and Neo-Geo there's WinKawaks, http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/download.html.

When it comes to recording on PC I personally use an old version of Camtasia Studio, but for a free solution what Fireball recommended is good. For a codec I use xvid or x264vfw which aren't lossless, though using a lossless codec would probably be the better way to go.

Edit: In response to what BirdyFan said about getting stuff from torrents, I recommend getting programs from official websites to avoid malware or alterations to the files.

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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts."

I'm making progress. I was able to get Bomberman World up and running but the other roms I tried were a bust, even when I downloaded them from different sites.

I'm also trying to take screenshots/video but it all turns out black. Is there something I need to adjust in Mame's options so it will appear?

I've never recorded mame, and seeing how every time I try to record something new, i come up with a different process, i'm just going to say you're on your own figuring it out.

There are a ton of roms you'll have to get to run neo-bomberman, a good way to go is try to run it even if it's red, see what files it says it's missing, and then grab them individually and keep doing it tell you are golden.

That or come by a complete mame romset ;P.

Mame allows you to change the video mode which might help, but it's better to just use one of the following methods instead.

You could check the "Disable display acceleration during capture" box in the CamStudio settings, that should probably do the trick. If that doesn't work then try opening DXDiag and disable "DirectDraw Acceleration" located in the display tab, that also disables Direct3D acceleration as well though.

Windows XP users could run NetMeeting which when running disables all of the necessary layers and accelerations that prevent capturing, it also disables resize filters on many video player programs.

In WinKawaks if you set the video blitter to KScale (MMX only) then it will use a nice sharp stretching filter that's unique to Kawaks instead of being pixelized, when it comes to recording you probably don't want to be recording with any filters on it, since you'd want it to look like it originally should.

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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts."